MyChores Journal

As of today, i hear that Twitter are no longer delivering text messages to UK mobile numbers (and i think other parts of Europe are being excluded too). This means if you rely on Twitter to deliver your chores each day, i’m afraid that will no longer work, until Twitter draw up a new contract [...]

Further to my post on How to update Twitter from Ruby/Rails, here is a method to verify account details with an AJAX link and results feedback. I got the idea from twitterfeed.com and pretty much reverse-engineered their code - mine behaves in exactly the same way.

I worked on cleaning up a few things today. I have installed Rails 2.0 at home and it seems to be running okay. I’m not yet sure when HostingRails will upgrade us to version 2.0.
I made some changes, mostly just for me actually, so that i can approve testimonials, make people into site supporters and [...]

There have been some problems with the emails over the last few days, which have hopefully been sorted now. I can only imagine there was some sort of Rails upgrade which broke the email script because it was perfectly fine until it just stopped working for no apparent reason. Anyway, i have replaced the problematic [...]

Thank you to shanerh for pointing out an error for new joiners. My bad completely – i should have tested it. I should also have done a bit more impact analysis before i made a fix for something else earlier in the week … i forgot to think about where else it might have been [...]

Apologies to everyone who uses Twitter integration and experienced errors over the last couple of days.
I had separated some bits of code and forgot to link them all up properly to make the Twitter update. This caused an error which meant that the task’s next due date was not moved on. I’m sorry for the [...]

It is now possible for you to receive Twitter direct messages from MyChores. If you have phone alerts set up, you will therefore get a text message. If you have IM you’ll get an instant message. You will get one message each day, and it will tell you today’s tasks, or it will tell you [...]

I have set up a special MyChores account on Twitter. Imaginitively enough, it’s at twitter.com/mychores.
The primary objective of this is to be able to give out information about MyChores in the event that the servers go down, as they did twice this week.
However, simplify3 has also given me the idea of using the Twitter API [...]

I believe in sharing knowledge, so here is the method to achieve a Twitter update from Ruby (using POST, as GET is now disabled by Twitter for security reasons). This code requires Ruby 1.8.5 for the set_form_data method.
With Ruby on Rails, the following is best placed in a controller. This probably isn’t the only way [...]

Well, i can safely say the hardest part about that was upgrading to Ruby 1.8.5 … which turned into the expected classpath nightmare, followed by a versioning nightmare, followed by a compile nightmare … i got my computer into such a bad state that i had to re-install the operating system this morning!!
Once i eventually [...]